The Kingdom of Prussia was a state which existed in large parts of northern Germany and also in northern Poland and even parts of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia at different stages between its creation in 1701 and the unification of Germany in 1871. Prior to this, it existed as the Duchy of Prussia and Margraviate of Brandenburg centered on Berlin, which in late medieval times was little more than a small town. Prussia emerged as a formidable military and political power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and led the unification of Germany in 1871. It continued to exist in a ceremonial capacity down to the end of the First World War, while historians often theorize that the German state, down to the end of Nazism in 1945, was driven by Prussian martial culture. The Prussian state was responsible for various kinds of migration over the centuries. In its earliest iteration it drove German eastwards colonization into Poland and the Baltic Sea region. Later this same German migration was reversed after centuries at the end of the Second World War when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were either driven out of Poland into modern-day Germany or voluntarily migrated.[1]
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Kingdom of Prussia chronology of eventsKingdom of Prussia chronology of events
The Kingdom of Prussia officially came into existence at the very outset of the eighteenth century when the Duke of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III, declared the creation of the kingdom with him ruling as King Frederick I of Prussia. But, the Prussian state had existed in one form or another for hundreds of years prior to this. Its ultimate origins are to be found way back in the High Middle Ages when German lords and religious knightly orders like the Teutonic and Livonian Knights were engaged in efforts to conquer and colonize the lands of peoples like the Wends, Balts and Lithuanians, Slavic groups who lived along the southern rim of the Baltic Sea, many of which had not yet converted to Christianity. From the eleventh century onwards, and in particular during the Crusader era of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these German lords and religious knights steadily conquered lands further eastwards through northern Poland, what is now known as the Kaliningrad Oblast (ruled as a non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation) Lithuania and into Latvia.[2]
The Prussian state’s direct forbear was the State of the Teutonic Order which came to rule over this large swathe of land by the middle of the thirteenth century. Although a religious order, the Teutonic Order ruled this state for more than two centuries. They even extended their rule into Estonia by purchasing lands there from the Kingdom of Denmark in the fourteenth century. It was only in the mid-fifteenth century that its position as a crusader state was questioned and it was secularised and divided up between a number of aristocrats and monarchs. Some lands went to the Kingdom of Poland. Others were formed into the Duchy of Prussia. This was the first full iteration of the Prussian state. As we will see, this period of Teutonic rule which formed the basis of the emergence of the Prussian state was important in terms of Germanic migration eastwards.[3]
The Duchy of Prussia was a northern Polish and Baltic state for most of its early history and its capital was the city of Konigsberg (modern-day Kaliningrad). It only gradually began acquiring lands in Germany, primarily after the Hohenzollern family, the rulers of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, centered on Berlin in north-eastern Germany, inherited the Duchy of Prussia. The union of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1618 made this an emerging great power in northern Germany, one which now challenged the Catholic south German Habsburgs of Austria for pre-eminence within Central Europe. As part of that process, Duke Frederick III of Brandenburg-Prussia proclaimed himself to be a monarch, King Frederick I, in 1701. Hence was born the Kingdom of Prussia.[4]
Prussia continued to grow in power in the eighteenth century, based largely on its military prowess and the rule of effective monarchs like Frederick II, better known as Frederick the Great. Through a series of advantageous alliances with Britain and other countries at various times, it managed to wage a series of wars in which it acquired land from Austria and other German states, notably the mineral and industry rich province of Silesia in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Partitions of Poland between 1773 and 1795 also saw Prussia, Russia and Austria increase their territory in Eastern Europe substantially at the expense of the dying Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.[5]
Although the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) went very poorly for Prussia at times, particularly the disastrous terms of the Treaty of Tilsit that the Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, imposed on Prussia in 1807, they exited the wars as a restored power.[6] The decades that followed saw Prussia engaged in a long rivalry with Austria to see which of the two larger German states could lead the unification of Germany in an age of growing nationalism across Europe. It was Prussia, under its brilliant statesman, Otto von Bismarck, who achieved this through a series of swift wars against Denmark, Austria and France once he became the de-facto prime minister of Prussia in 1862. At the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, 39 German states, excluding Austria and led by Prussia, united to form the German Empire in a ceremony strangely held at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris rather than in Germany itself.[7]
Although the German Empire did include a number of other large states, like Bavaria, it was really under Prussian leadership, symbolized in the fact that King Wilhelm I of Prussia became the first German emperor, while Bismarck became Chancellor of Germany. This was also something of a federal empire and the distinct kingdoms and duchies that joined to make up the empire retained their own separate identities down to the collapse of the German Empire at the end of the First World War. Thus, although the Kingdom of Prussia theoretically ceased to exist in certain ways in 1871, it could be argued that it retained its own separate identity within the empire well into the twentieth century.[8]
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Extent of migration associated with the Kingdom of PrussiaExtent of migration associated with the Kingdom of Prussia
Throughout its history, Prussia was responsible for a significant amount of migration. As the Teutonic Order and then as the emergent Duchy of Prussia in late medieval times, it oversaw the conquest and colonization of a large stretch of territory running from eastern Germany into northern Poland and beyond to Kaliningrad, Lithuania, Latvia and even a few pockets of Estonia. This was an important development of European history, one which formed the backdrop for Nazi Germany’s claim to Eastern Europe as a part of the planned Third Reich at the time of the Second World War.[9]
The German element became particularly prominent in the cities and towns like Danzig (modern-day Gdansk), Konigsberg, Reval (modern-day Tallinn) and Memel in the early modern era and also amongst the rich, landed aristocrats of the region, the so-called junkers of subsequent centuries. Subsequent acquisition of new land at the time of the Partitions of Poland increased the range of land available for large German landholders to move into in the region.[10]
Yet this process was also reversed in the course of Prussian history. The collapse of the German Empire and the simultaneous outbreak of the Russian Civil War had provided an opportunity for groups like the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians to re-establish their independence at the end of the First World War, while a new Polish state was created again. Much of the former lands of eastern Prussia were lost as a result and many ethnic Germans left parts of the region to go and live in Germany itself. This process was reaffirmed again at the end of the Second World War when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans fled from places like northern Poland in the wake of the advancing Soviet Red Army. Forced expulsions to what remained of Germany continued in the months after the war ended.[11]
Demographic impact of the Kingdom of PrussiaDemographic impact of the Kingdom of Prussia
This thousand-year history of eastwards conquest and colonization of lands along the southern rim of the Baltic Sea by the Teutonic Knights and other medieval Germans not only ushered in the Duchy of Prussia and the later the Kingdom of Prussia, it changed the entire demography of a vast strip of land running from eastern Germany all the way north-east to Estonia. It could be argued this was reversed because of the forced removals and mass exile from northern Poland, Lithuania and other regions back to Germany at the end of the Second World War.
But this simply cannot account for the level of intermarriage and interbreeding between these groups that had gone on over a period of a thousand years. While social, economic, political and racial mores did dictate that many ethnic Germans in the Prussian lands married within their own ethnic groups, over many centuries, these barriers broke down and Germans also intermarried with Lithuanians, Poles and others. Therefore, while a large chunk of the allegedly ‘pure’ Germans of the region left in modern times, the reality is that a very large proportion of people in places like northern Poland, Lithuania and Latvia today will, if they research their family history back far enough, find a German ancestor of one kind or another from the days of either the Duchy or Kingdom of Prussia. In this sense, the various iterations of the Prussian state transformed the demography of this part of Europe in many subtle ways over the centuries.[12]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Kingdom of PrussiaExplore more about the Kingdom of Prussia
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- Germany, Marriages, 1558-1929 records collection on MyHeritage
- Germany, Deaths and Burials, 1582-1958 records collection on MyHeritage
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- Germany, Prussia, Brandenburg and Posen, Church Book Duplicates, 1794-1874 records collection on MyHeritage
- West Prussia Church Books records collection on MyHeritage
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References
- ↑ Sebastian Haffner, The Rise and Fall of Prussia (London, 1998).
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Northern_Crusades/
- ↑ https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/05/ordenstaat-the-state-founded-by-the-teutonic-knights-in-the-baltic/
- ↑ E. C. Helmreich, ‘The Rise of Prussia’, in Current History, Vol. 28, No. 164 (April, 1955), pp. 205–210.
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/partitions-of-poland-and-lithuania/
- ↑ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/treaty-between-prussia-and-france-tilsit-9-july-1807/
- ↑ https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/otto-von-bismarck-unification-germany-unify-biography-facts-how-prussian-politician/
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z36wycw/revision/2
- ↑ Charles Ingrao and Franz A. J. Szabo, The Germans and the East (West Lafayette, Indiana, 2008).
- ↑ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/180452/summary
- ↑ Hugo Service, ‘Reinterpreting the Expulsion of Germans from Poland, 1945–9’, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 47, No. 3 (July, 2012), pp. 528–550.
- ↑ Krzysztof Rebala, et al., ‘Contemporary paternal genetic landscape of Polish and German populations: from early medieval Slavic expansion to post-World War II resettlements’, European Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 21 (2013), pp. 415–422.